why modern art? 2

Why modern art?This is the question that even the most brutal of dictators asked himself when he decided to organize that notoriously infamous exhibition on so-called degenerate art, which he chose to title “Entartete Kunst.”… It was an exhibition dedicated to the artistic “worst,” where the avant-gardes of “degeneration” were displayed in order to be mocked, despised, humiliated, insulted, and trampled upon…Yet the question, beyond its propagandistic intent, was not entirely unfounded: why, after centuries of art striving toward beauty and the celestial, toward harmony and enchantment, did the goal suddenly seem to become the opposite? The deformed, the corrupted, the degraded, the desperate, the vicious, the dissolute… why this new art that confronted humanity with its own miseries, rather than its ideal and aesthetic virtues? Something had clearly changed. The so-called “artistic degeneration” spoke a new language restless, more direct, more engaging...Thus, what had once been clumsy or deformed became, in its own way, a renewed aesthetic, while that “Raphaelite” beauty gradually slipped into an almost purely decorative dimension, certainly perceived as elegant and agreeable, but hardly engaging…And the artist, too, was reinvented: restless, troubled, anguished,better yet, desperate; the aspiring suicide became almost ideal. Expressionist or minimalist, Surrealist or Dadaist, as long as they stood apart from any form of classicism, realism, or that empty figurativism now relegated to Sunday markets… farewell to chocolate-box sunsets, farewell to lovers with feathers in their hats…“Degenerate” art conquered the world: endless lines at increasingly “degenerate” biennials, triennials, quadriennials… visitors drawn in,enchanted or nauseated,but in any case involved, unsettled, and moved by that new language, which pushed much of what had come before into the background…Better a strong, athletic nude by Rubens, or a twisted, deformed, defecating figure by Bacon? Better a Canova or a Henry Moore? By far the defecating Bacon and the tangled Moore,“degenerate,” just as we all are, and in that, we fully recognize ourselves.